Use a Leviton dimmer to easily navigate your home at night

It’s 1:15 AM and you’re thirsty. As a resident of a first-world country, you have a refrigerator stocked with many wonderful beverages that can quench your thirst. A glass of milk, perhaps. Or a small bit of water. All that lies between you and your drink is the living room, a vast wasteland strewn with tables, chairs, and, most cruelly, Legos.

Is the drink worth the trip? You could turn on the light, of course, but that would blind you and make it impossible to fall back asleep after your mission is complete. Or you could stumble through the darkness, navigating by shin bump.

But with Staples Connect, you can avoid these dilemmas. Using our new Leviton dimmer and a motion sensor, you can turn the lights on to a low level, preserving your eyesight and your shins.

Dimmer switches and motion sensors become extremely useful when they’re connected to your Staples Connect hub. Instead of simply being able to dim the lights or tell you something’s detected, you can use each of them to turn other devices on and off. By themselves, they’re useful, but when they’re used together (as they are in our scenario) they can do some really cool things.

We’re going to need them, too, because our scenario has a catch. Although we need our dimmer to turn the lights on to a low brightness, it should only do this at night. During the day, the lights should be at full brightness.

We can do this by creating an Activity that only runs if the motion sensor detects motion at night and will turn the lights on to 10% brightness. This will give us the brightness we need at the time we need.

To create this Activity:

Click Activities.

Click New Activity, then enter a name for your Activity.

We need to tell your Staples Connect system that the motion sensor will start the Activity. Choose “The Activity will be started by one of my devices,” then select the motion sensor.

Now we need to tell your system when it should do what we want it to, which is at night when we sleep. Click the Reason dropdown, then choose “When the device detects motion.” Click the When dropdown and select “Between two times”, then set the Start and End Times to reflect when you sleep.

With our conditions in place, we can now choose the lights we want to turn on. Choose the Leviton dimmer, then click Next.

Click Choose, then set the dimmer to 10. You might want to test this a few times until you’re sure the lights are at a good level.

You can make your Activity send you an email or push notification each time it runs. We’ve got a sneaky feeling that you probably won’t want to do that (if so, click Skip) but if you do, enter your message and select the Users who should receive the notification.

Review your Activity, then click Finish.

Now you can move around your house at night without worrying about your shins and your eyes.